Memoir traces journey of a life

Updated 1:42 pm, Friday, December 21, 2012

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"Voice from the Mangrove Swamps" by Barry Essien

"Voice from the Mangrove Swamps" by Barry Essien

Memoir traces journey of a life

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Albany resident Bassey Essien's four daughters graduated from a roster of big-name U.S. colleges: MIT, Cornell, Brown, Stanford. This would be impressive for anyone, but it is especially remarkable for someone who grew up in a small Nigerian village without benefit of any formal education.

As Essien, 67, tells in his memoir, "Voice from the Mangrove Swamps" (Dorrance Publishing, 2012, $25) his mother and father selected just two of their children — his older brother and younger sister — to go to school. Essien, on the other hand, was required to work alongside his parents daily in their subsistence farming and fishing work. The work was physically exhausting and often dangerous. The farmwork he did for his mother as a child included clearing thick brush with a machete, unsupervised and, as he writes, "left to devise your own technique for using it." Injuries were frequent and usually went untreated.

He would prepare for fishing with his father by exploring the area's mangrove swamps barefoot to cut the raffia needed to make temporary shelters at the fishing grounds. Fishing trips on the area's deep creeks and rivers and in the Atlantic Ocean were all done in a canoe without any life jackets, although Essien could not swim. He once was injured badly enough to require hospitalization when he fell onto a machete that had been left behind at a makeshift fishing campground.

But throughout Essien's early years, his older brother Offiong continued to feed him, informally and piecemeal, bits of knowledge about the alphabet. With chalk and a small blackboard, Offiong showed him how to write each letter; occasionally he would ask the younger boy to sound out a word from their native Efik dialect and guess its spelling. Slowly Essien began to learn how to read and write.

Like many self-published memoirs, "Voice from the Mangrove Swamps" Essien's is a bit unwieldy in its scope, covering the author's life from childhood to close to the present. Yet it is remarkable for his dramatic stories and for the author's constant, undefined yearning to be something more.

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It was this yearning that motivated him to follow his older brother to the then-capital of Lagos when Essien was just 14. "My whole hope," he said during a recent chat at his small, tidy home in Colonie, "was that as soon as I got there my brother was going to set me up to go to school."

That was not to be. Offiong insisted instead that he get some occupational training. Offiong suggested carpentry, but Bassey chose photography. He writes that he thought photography, with its lengthy user manuals and safety instructions, "would force me to learn English." With his brother's help, he landed an apprenticeship at a photography studio. He went on first to a paid journeyman job and then to running his own small business.

In the United States he first attended an adult education center in Washington, D.C., to study for the GED. He went on to get a bachelor's degree from American University before moving north and earning a master's in educational communications and an Ed.D. from UAlbany.

It was many years before he went back to the country he'd left in 1969. He returned for a visit in 1988 with his wife (whom he had met at a gathering of Nigerian students, and who hailed from a village just a few miles from his own) and their four small children in tow. He broke down crying when he got to his village, because, as he explains to me, "I sighted my mother coming back from the farm with a little bundle on her head, you know? And she looked so tiny, so sickly." He saw her and thought, "My mother is still doing this, this farm?"

His parents seem to have been happy with his success. His father, he says, said little during their visit, except to criticize him for the way he left his business affairs when he departed Lagos for the U.S. (Essien had handed over the company and his equipment to a young employee, who eventually lost the business).

Both of Essien's parents passed away soon after the visit—his father in 1988, his mother in 1989.

For 26 years Essien has worked for the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. He has little interest in retiring, he says, "maybe because I started everything in life so late. I want to treasure these brains, and keep them working."

In his spare time he works to advance the education of Nigerian youth. As public relations officer for the Association of Nigerians in the Capital District, he helps run the organization's program of scholarships awarded annually to two qualified high school seniors. His wife passed away 10 years ago, and he is now working to establish a scholarship in her name for middle school students in her hometown.

With this book, Essien feels that he has been able, finally, to give a voice to the inarticulate longings he felt as a child.